Actress, Jodie Turner-Smith, gave birth for the first time amidst a global pandemic, welcoming her little girl into the world with her husband, Joshua Jackson, by her side.
Jodie reflected on her life-changing journey to motherhood in an essay for British Vogue. She opened up about the challenges she faced during pregnancy, from shooting her first action movie, Without Remorse, in Berlin to hopping on a plane back to the US to promote the critically acclaimed, Queen and Slim — not to mention the constant nausea and fatigue, in addition to subchorionic bleeds, all in her first trimester.
“God knows what my baby thought was happening, because I spent most of that trimester either on set, tearing around the centre of Berlin with tactical gear and a rifle while blowing things up, or rushing through an airport to catch a flight back to America to promote Queen & Slim,” she writes.
Jodie also went on to talk about her laborious delivery, which lasted four days. She decided on a home birth in Los Angeles. On the third day of her labour, Jodie beautifully describes how her husband, Joshua, captured this breathtaking image of Jodie in a bath while giving birth.
“Early in the morning on my third day of labour, my husband and I shared a quiet moment. I was fatigued and beginning to lose my resolve. Josh ran me a bath, and as I lay in it contracting, I talked to my body and I talked to my daughter. In that moment, he snapped a picture of me. An honest moment of family and togetherness – a husband supporting a wife, our baby still inside me, the sacred process of creating a family,” Jodie wrote.
In Jodie’s Instagram post she made sure to congratulate her loving husband for being a Vogue photographer now.
When trying to work through what to tell her daughter about the racial injustices, global health concerns and everything else which was at the forefront of society at the time of her birth, Jodie said, “I think I will tell her that it was as if the world had paused for her to be born. And that, hopefully, it never quite returned to the way it was before.”
